Theory Of Moral Sentiments Research Articles

Evaluation on The Theory of Moral Sentiments: Endless Challenge Between Morality and Wealth

Bu çalışma Smith’in özgün metni olan Ahlaki Duygular Kuramı’nın, bir toplum kuramı, ahlaki bir yaşam tasarısı biçiminde okunabileceğine dönük bir çabanın ürünüdür. Smith’in bireyi her ne kadar kişisel çıkar motivasyonuna bağımlı görülse de durumunu iyileştirmeye, maddi zenginliğe yönelik etkinlikte bulunuyor olsa da aslında en başta ahlaki kaygılarla örülü, ötekini gözeten bir bireydir. Ötekini, başkasını sempati ve yansız gözlemci dolayımlarıyla tanıyan, bilen bu birey, saf bir zenginlik peşinde koşmazdan önce ya da bunun yanı sıra bir toplumsallık, uyumlu bir birliktelik adına yaşamını erdemli kılmaya çalışan sorumlu bir birey olarak Smith anlatısında karşımızda belirmektedir. Bu çalışmada genel kabul gören Smithçi “kişisel çıkar” peşinde koşan karikatürize edilmiş bireyin aksine görece göz ardı edilmiş olan Smithçi “ötekini” önemseyen bireyin varlığının altı çizilecektir. Smith’in bireyinin çok yönlülüğünün kanıtı, incelenen özgün metinde sergilenecek olup nihayetinde maddi çıkar motivasyonunun ötesinde başkasını tanıma, öteki tarafından bilinme kaygılarının da Smith anlatısının olmazsa olmazı olduğu gösterilecektir.

Adam Smith's moral foundations of self‐interest and ethical social order

AbstractThis article draws on textual evidence from The Theory of Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations to address mistaken interpretations of Adam Smith's fundamental concept of self‐interest as greed that has been said to have had a corrosive influence on markets, commercial behaviour, and widening inequality. To the contrary, Smith's complex set of human motivations, including self‐interest, his economic system that is based on free markets, and institutional frameworks governing productive property rights and the rule of law are argued to increase aggregate wealth, improve the position of those least well off, and maintain ethical social order.

Adam Smith's reversionary annuity: money's worth, default options and auto-enrollment

When Adam Smith – author of Wealth of Nations (1776) and Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) – was elected a professor at the University of Glasgow in 1751, he also joined an annuity ‘scheme’ that was unique for its time. The Scottish Ministers’ Widows’ Fund, as it was known, offered members of the Presbyterian Church as well as the university a choice of levels at which to contribute investment savings, ranging from 2 to 10 percent of their wages. The life-contingent benefits were in the form of a reversionary annuity to a spouse and/or lump sum death benefit to children. This article (i) describes the scheme in financial and actuarial terms, (ii) values Smith's reversionary annuity and (iii) examines the choices made by individual participants. The specific research contribution is to compile the archival data to measure the extent of insurance anti-selection and to demonstrate that debates around choice architecture, default options and auto-enrollment, which infuse the literature in the twenty-first century, were prevalent in the mid eighteenth. For the record, Adam Smith actively contributed at the highest allowed rate, but it wasn't a ‘good’ investment for him, either ex ante or ex post. As for why, one must read the article.

Behavior, religion, and socio-economic development: a synthesized theoretical framework

Due to theoretical shortcomings, most of the literature that examines the impact of religion on economic well-being fails to distinguish between the religion and the religion constituents. Moreover, the current framework has a narrow focus on economic well-being, does not facilitate for empirical testing, and is troubled by the problem of endogeneity. This paper introduces a framework for the empirical and descriptive study of the impact of religion on socio-economic development. The framework introduced facilitates for the adoption of both inductive and deductive approaches, allowing one to operationalize and analyze the religion itself, to test whether it embodies any principles that might hinder development by facilitating for the construction of a quantitative measure, which seeks to differentiate between the religion and the behavior of its constituents, as well as facilitate for a descriptive study of the religion itself. An example of how to utilize the framework developed is provided for the case of Islam, where the concept of Mafsada, public harm, in the Maqasid of Shariah, the purpose of Islamic jurisprudence, is operationalized, alongside Adam Smith’s Worthless Fellow in the Theory of Moral Sentiments, to develop a composite measure whose corollaries represent behavior a worthless fellow might engage in and would subsequently lead to societal harm. These corollaries can also be adopted in an empirical study as independent variables. Moreover, Ibn Khuldon’s Theory of Development is also utilized along with Max Weber’s Protestant Ethic to facilitate for the study as to why Muslim countries are underdeveloped, and whether their poor development is attributable to Islam, or due to factors relating to culture, justice, politics, and others. This study utilizes a causal research design as it facilitates for better understanding the nature and the extent of the relationship between variables in poorly understood phenomena—behavior, religion, and how, and whether, they can impact development.

Egalitarian sympathies? Adam Smith and Sophie de Grouchy on inequality and social order

AbstractThis article analyses Adam Smith's and Sophie de Grouchy's accounts of sympathy to show how they arrive at strikingly different views on whether inequality is a threat to, or precondition of, social order. Where many scholars have recently sought to recover Smith's egalitarianism, I instead focus on how his account of sympathy in The Theory of Moral Sentiments naturalises socioeconomic inequalities, while also highlighting the wider inegalitarian implications of his analysis. I demonstrate that Grouchy was alert to these implications and reveal how her own account of sympathy challenges the moral psychology underlying Smith's position on inequality. By reconstructing Grouchy's response to Smith, I illustrate how retrieving the insights of long‐overlooked thinkers can reorient the way we understand key debates in the history of philosophy, since Grouchy was far more concerned than Smith with exposing how economic inequality imperils the prospects of relating to one another as equals.

Self-Interest, prosociality, and the moral cognition of markets: A comparative analysis of the Theory of Moral Sentiments and the Wealth of Nations

In this paper, we perform a text analysis of Adam Smith’s two books, the Theory of Moral Sentiments and the Wealth of Nations, to better characterize their highly disputed differences in terms of moral cognition. In particular, given that Smith’s ideas are still very cited and influential in the current scholarly debate on moral cognition, we are interested in understanding whether a text analysis would unveil a semantic structure that is in line with a dual process theory interpretation or, alternatively, with a neuro-emergent cognition one. We find that, despite that the intellectual koine in which Smith’s thought was originally embedded would be more in line with a dual process theory approach, the analysis reveals a better consonance with the neuro-emergent cognition approach. This opens new and interesting perspectives in future research on the moral cognition of market interactions in a Smithian tradition of thought.

Adam Smith and Stuart Mill on the vanity of Homo Oeconomicus

Vanity underlies human behavior and can be expressed in various forms in the social, moral, aesthetic, and economic fields. It is an emotional complex that encompasses narcissism and histrionics as character traits, as well as other functions, such as memory, imagination, cognition, and instinctive drive. This study focuses on homo oeconomicus using an economic-philosophical approach to detail vanity in a situation of social interaction between an agent who shows off and a spectator who observes when the topic is a mutual comparison in the face of external signs of wealth. To that end, Adam Smith’s thoughts on vanity in the Theory of Moral Sentiments and Stuart Mill's studies on disturbances in economic models is used. In conclusion, we intend to demonstrate that the thoughts of these two economist-philosophers remain relevant in determining the vanity of the contemporary homo oeconomicus.

Disaffected: The Cultural Politics of Unfeeling in Nineteenth-Century America by Xine Yao

Reviewed by: Disaffected: The Cultural Politics of Unfeeling in Nineteenth-Century America by Xine Yao Denise Wong (bio) Disaffected: The Cultural Politics of Unfeeling in Nineteenth-Century America, by Xine Yao. Durham: Duke University Press, 2021. Ix + 291 pp. $27.95 paper. ISBN 978-1-4780-1483-6. Disaffected: The Cultural Politics of Unfeeling in Nineteenth-Century America marks an exciting turn in affect studies towards the radical affordances of unfeeling as a tactic of resistance. Xine Yao's debut monograph moves critical discussion beyond "the stifling imperatives of the political stakes of sympathy" to uncover "what we can apprehend" by "stay[ing] with the negativity of unfeeling and [End Page 105] suspend[ing] its rehabilitation" (3). Disaffection is both negative feeling and the negation of feeling as resistance but neither resolved nor subsumed by discourses of overcoming. It is a mode for understanding the extent to which cultural fantasies of justice and social change are contingent upon a politics of recognition and sympathy. Yao contends that the Western liberal project of inclusion demands sympathetic recognition and, though seemingly innocuous, presumes a false universality masking an insidious disparity between who gets to retain their subject status while refusing to feel. One of Yao's most generative provocations is her reading of sympathetic recognition as a colonial legacy originating in the culture of sentiment advanced by Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759). She identifies four modes of disaffected unfeeling "in the cultural imagination deployed to flatten out and invalidate individual and collective subtleties" (6): unsympathetic Blackness, queer frigidity, Black objective passionlessness, and Oriental inscrutability. Although Disaffected is concerned with how American literature and culture understands affect and politics, a paradigm with a disproportionately global impact, the scope of Yao's framework extends far beyond the geographic and historical specificity of her corpus which focuses on nineteenth-century fiction that "question[s] the politics of sympathetic identification in the cultural imagination informed by sentimentalism" (21). The primary texts include Herman Melville's Benito Cereno (1855), Martin R. Delany's Blake; or the Huts of America (1861), Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's Doctor Zay (1882), Frances Ellen Watkins Harper's Iola Leroy (1892), and Edith Maude Eaton's Mrs. Spring Fragrance (1912). These writers "use the space of fiction to question the politics of sympathetic identification in the cultural imagination informed by sentimentalism" (21). The first two chapters explore unsympathetic Blackness as a mode of dissent from two contexts. In the first, the novella Benito Cereno illustrates how the false universality of white sentimentalism ensures that Babo, Melville's Senegalese slave-turned-rebel leader, remains an illegible and thus contemptible subject. Following philosophers Denise Ferreira da Silva and Sylvia Wynter, Yao argues this falsely universal discourse of sentimentality is predicated upon racialised politics of recognition. In the second, Martin R. Delany's eponymous protagonist Blake rejects dominant white modes of feeling but, instead of being executed as an act of justice, he forms an alliance with the Indigenous community "to unmake the structural conditions of Black enslavement and Indigenous dispossession that produce the modern world" (23). Borrowing Tiffany King's formulation, Yao reads "convergence without conflation" (73) in the way Blake "disrupt[s] the colonial dichotomization of Blackness and Indigeneity as antagonistic to each other" (77) by thinking through the historical and theoretical intersections of Black emancipation and Indigenous sovereignty. [End Page 106] The third chapter reads queer frigidity as a consequence of white middleclass women's entry into the medical profession. Yao takes Phelps's Doctor Zay as an example amidst a cluster of late nineteenth-century American novels which use the marriage plot to stage debates about the correlation between love and political desire for suffrage and other rights. The expectation for women to reappropriate "the masculinized authority of medical science's disciplinary detachment" (112) juxtaposes "the coercive affective imperatives of marriage and family" (25). Yao focuses compellingly on the homology between the invention of anaesthesia and the pathologisation and queering of female frigidity (diagnosed by sexologist Havelock Ellis as "a medical condition prevalent among women" [114]). Anaesthesia as a mechanism of controlled unfeeling for professional advancement parallels "the alleged abnormality of frigidity" (115) in the way detachment signifies agency...

SMITH AT 300: NEGATIVE JUSTICE AND POLITICAL WISDOM

Adam Smith is known as a liberal thinker. The political system that he promotes and describes as one of “perfect justice, perfect liberty, and perfect equality” (Wealth of Nations [1776] 1981; WN IV.ix.17:669) is characterized by the primacy of the rights of non-interference and the protection of a private sphere where every individual directs her life according to her own decisions. The moral justification for the primacy of negative justice is in the second book of The Theory of Moral Sentiments, where he unambiguously states: “Mere justice is, upon most occasions, but a negative virtue, and only hinders us from hurting our neighbor” ([1759] 1982; TMS II.i.1.9:82). For the same reason, the first time I read that book, the following paragraph struck me as an inexplicable contradiction, an incomprehensible lapse in Adam Smith’s thoroughly revised text: A superior may, indeed, sometimes, with universal approbation, oblige those under his jurisdiction to behave, in this respect, with a certain degree of propriety to one another. … The civil magistrate is entrusted with the power not only of preserving the public peace by restraining injustice, but of promoting the prosperity of the commonwealth, by establishing good discipline, and by discouraging every sort of vice and impropriety; he may prescribe rules, therefore, which not only prohibit mutual injuries among fellow-citizens, but command mutual good offices to a certain degree. … Of all the duties of a law-giver, however, this, perhaps, is that which it requires the greatest delicacy and reserve to execute with propriety and judgment. To neglect it altogether exposes the commonwealth to many gross disorders and shocking enormities, and to push it too far is destructive of all liberty, security, and justice. (TMS II.ii.1.8)

SMITH AT 300: COMMERCIAL SOCIETY AND THE WOMEN’S QUESTION

Adam Smith’s views on inequality have recently been examined with some interest (Rasmussen 2016; Walraevens 2021). But was Smith really genuinely interested in addressing the shortcomings of the society built on the “liberal plan of equality, liberty and justice” (Smith 1975, Wealth of Nations; WN IV.ix)? While critical accounts of Smith’s thought may tend to zero in on his concerns with absolute poverty—or the equality in the “share of the necessaries of life” (Smith 1976, Theory of Moral Sentiments; TMS IV.1.10)—rather than economic inequality, they may perhaps also tend to confuse his account of our tendencies to admire the rich and powerful with the advocacy of a system in which the rich and powerful ride roughshod over the poor and disempowered as long as the order of the society founded on the “distinction of ranks” (TMS I.iii.2) is preserved.

SMITH AT 300: HOW SELFISH SOEVER MAN MAY BE SUPPOSED

Selecting a single favorite quote from the work of one’s favorite thinker is quite a challenge. Although I had been immediately enthusiastic about the project when I first heard about it, I struggled with this selection task for weeks. The first reason is that there are just so many quotable passages in Adam Smith’s work that I like very much, and not always on the same grounds. Some quotes I appreciate because they drive home Smith’s broader argument, or because they are philosophically rich, such as his quite Lockean evaluation of long apprenticeships in the Wealth of Nations ([1776] 1976; WN I. x.c.12). Others have been long-time companions for me, either because they require a more meticulous analysis than one would think, for example the famous brewer or baker passage (WN I.ii.2), or because there is something paradoxical about them, such as the quote that describes “the great precept of nature to love ourselves only as our neighbour is capable of loving us” (Theory of Moral Sentiments [1756] 1976; TMS I.i.5.5). And then there are passages that are enormous fun to read because Smith gives free rein to his literary skills and irony, such as the “poor man’s son” passage in the Theory of Moral Sentiments (TMS IV.i.8), or where he sheds his polite restraint, for example when he lashes out against Oxford (TMS V.ii.f.8) or against colluding merchants (WN I.x.c.27). The second reason why the choice wasn’t easy had to do with the underlying, perhaps unintended, incentives of the project itself. Opting for a popular quote came at the risk of more competition and fewer chances in the submission process. In the end, I nevertheless dropped all tactical considerations and went for the well-known opening words in Smith’s first opus magnum, the Theory of Moral Sentiments: “How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it except the pleasure of seeing it” (TMS I.i.I.1).

The Combination of Smith's Egoism and Social Public Interest --Taking the Constraint on Egoism as a Perspective

The combination of egoism and the social public interest is one of the topics that have been widely discussed in Adam Smith's two books, The Theory of Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations. Based on the long-standing research on this topic in China, this paper selects the constraints on "egoism" common to both works to clarify the connection of "egoism" and the social public interest. Then it is conducive to understand more clearly the intention of this philosopher and economist, and to alleviate the long-standing ambiguity about the contradiction between the two views.

TOWARDS A “TEXT AS DATA” APPROACH IN THE HISTORY OF ECONOMICS: AN APPLICATION TO ADAM SMITH’S CLASSICS

Quantitative techniques have received increasing attention in the history and methodology of economics. Nonetheless, a “text as data” approach has mostly been overlooked and its applicability to the history of economics remains to be examined. To understand what we gain from such quantitative techniques in relation to existing historical analyses, we apply some “text as data” techniques to Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations. We explore the books’ topics, styles, and sentiments. We show how word frequency analysis can be used to examine the differences between the books, shed light on conceptual discussions, and reveal an important stylistic aspect, specifically Smith’s use of personal pronouns. Style analysis shows the similarities and differences in terms of lexical richness and readability between the two books. We also show the limitations of a third technique, sentiment analysis, when applied to historical economic texts.

Life, death and commodification: Fear of death in the work of Adam Smith

The purpose of this article is to analyse Adam Smith’s view of death in The Theory of Moral Sentiments for commercial society to determine whether the current commodification of goods (e.g. pharmaceuticals) and services (e.g. cryogenics) to assist people to deal with the fear of death was what Smith envisioned for meaningful existence and to find out what he proposed as a means to manage the fear of death in existence. The investigation revealed that Smith’s book contains many references to death as a source of anxiety that negatively influences the lives of people, their happiness and meaning in life, and ignites fear and anxiety. The cultural measure of Smith’s time to manage the fear of death are magnanimity (e.g. war and suffering), the comfort of wealth, posthumous happiness (e.g. duty and sacrifice) and philosophy (e.g. Stoicism). The problem for Smith is that wealth and commodities, as is the case with the other means to deal with the fear of death, do not result in being-for-itself without the assistance of the impartial spectator which is a cognitive mechanism for self-awareness and socially located meaning-creation in the world with others.

‘PLUNDERING THE LIBERAL PHILOSOPHICAL TRADITION’? THE USE OR ABUSE OF ADAM SMITH IN PARLIAMENT, 1919–2023

AbstractThe contemporary relevance of Adam Smith is evidenced by continued reference to his name. Computational analysis identifies over 700 mentions of Smith and his two famous works—The Theory of Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations—in post-World War 1 House of Commons debates. We find some parliamentarians appreciate Smith’s complex ideas, but most references are ‘ornamental’. Charting Smith’s use over the decades, this paper builds on Kirk Willis’ idea that studying parliamentary debates are an ideal way to understand how, at best, policy ideas, germinate and disseminate over time, or, at worst, how ‘complex ideas became slogans’.

Affective Profit

Affective Profit

Favoured Isles: Selfishness and Sacrifice in the Capital of Capital

An important aspect of The Woman of Colour (1808) is its treatment of the linked concepts of selfishness, self-interest, and sympathy. Although its author does not mention Adam Smith, his discussion of these ideas in Theory of Moral Sentiments offers insights into both the novel’s plot and characters and its engagement with the ideals and practices of commerce, empire, and slavery. The protagonist, Olivia Fairfield, experiences numerous disappointments and betrayals during her stay in England, yet when she is about to return to her Jamaican home, she describes England as a “favoured isle” because it has produced some ideal men. In order for England and Jamaica to become “favoured isles,” it is essential that white residents of both locales abjure the selfishness that pervades imperialist and capitalist accumulation and treat everyone, including enslaved people, with sympathy. Doing so allows the novel’s several heroes to see themselves and be seen by others as benevolent, yet allows them to continue to reap the benefits of empire.

MORAL SENTIMENTS AND SELF-INTEREST IN ADAM SMITH: TWO COMMENTS

AbstractThis study is a reconsideration of a theme, connecting The Theory of Moral Sentiments and The Wealth of Nations, namely the interplay between moral sentiments and self-interest. Two aspects of the theme are examined. The first consists of an interpretation of the so-called ‘das Adam Smith Problem’, an issue originally pointed out by nineteenth-century German scholars. The second, building on the insight of Smith on the association of shame and poverty, reports on recent research that seeks to examine how emotions impact the perception of economic interests and behaviour in marginalized groups.

The Rediscovery of The Theory of Moral Sentiments by Neoclassical Economists: The Implications for Behavioral Finance and Economics

The Rediscovery of The Theory of Moral Sentiments by Neoclassical Economists: The Implications for Behavioral Finance and Economics

Difficult Conversations with Adam Smith

What can Adam Smith can teach us about the emotional terrain of difficult conversations, particularly those that touch on lived realities of injustice, oppression, and marginalization? In Part One of the Theory of Moral Sentiments, Adam Smith takes a few pages to dwell on the topic of interpersonal disagreement: more specifically, on how differently we feel about disagreements “with regard to such indifferent objects as concern neither me nor my companion” (TMS, 21) than we do when our own fortunes, feelings and even identity are bound up in the topic at hand. I argue that careful attention to Smith’s discussion of disagreement reveals a set of norms for navigating uncomfortable terrain that avoid the pitfalls of so-called tone-policing and other contemporary approaches to civility.